Hudnalls Place Their Beloved "Clifton" Under Easement - 135 Acres in Northumberland County
From the front stoop of their 1785 “Clifton” home, Bud and Gayle Hudnall look out toward a gently rolling meadow and forested acreage.

The name Clifton is believed to derive from the relative elevation of the property – “on a cliff” – and the site indeed is at about the highest point in the general area.

But it wasn’t what they saw the promptedplacement of a conservation easement on their 135 acres of Northumberland County property last year. Instead, it was what they sensed, and what they felt all around them.

“With all the development going on around us, we didn’t want to see it developed,” said Bud Hudnall recently, sitting in the dining room of the historic home that has been in his family since 1840. “We wanted to see it stay a working farm, and the conservation easement is definitely the way to make sure you can do that.”

Pointing to recent and ongoing plans for development, for potential cluster houses, and for “big box” retail outlets, Gayle Hudnall adds, “Development was coming at us from both directions. We can’t dictate that the property will stay in the family for all the generations to come, but this secures that it won’t be developed. If our family at some point in the future has to sell it, the easement will go with it.”

Because of the historic nature of their home – believed to have been initially built as a hunting lodge – the Hudnalls ended up putting the easement on the property and house through the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. National Geographic magazine in 1956 featured the property as part of a feature on historic Virginia properties, calling Clifton “one of the oldest houses in Virginia.”

There’s lots of history not only in the “Clifton” home but also in the property overall – the site in 1820 of what historians have called “some serious agricultural cultivation and processing.”

No wonder that Lancaster County and Northumberland County both wanted to claim the property as their own, resolving their differences only through a court decision ultimately decided in Northumberland’s favor.  

 

Nestled among the rolling acres of forests and corn, soybean, and wheat fields, the home itself was called “Blough Point” in the colonial period when it was owned by Landon Carter of Sabine Hall.  It features an unusual double stair case off an ample foyer – one for women visitors and one for men.  Carter referred to his Northumberland County acreage as “the best land almost that I have.”

Since taking the initiative in May 2007 to place their Clifton property in a conservation easement – a process that successfully concluded after six months – Bud and Gayle Hudnall now acknowledge the whole process as infinitely detailed and at times even tedious, notwithstanding the expert counsel they got from conservation easement attorney George C. Freeman, a nationally prominent environmental lawyer who for many years practiced in Richmond and who now lives in the Northern Neck.

Was the process expensive? “Yes,” the Hudnalls simultaneously reply. “But cost-effective.” And they’d do it all over again if they had to. (They don’t.)

In fact, the Hudnalls have become such ambassadors for the conservation easement option for protecting valuable and finite farm and forestry properties that they've become advocates of the process to several of their neighbors. And there are clear signs that their salesmanship is going to have important successes.

Northern Neck Land Conservancy, Inc. | PO Box 125| Lancaster, Virginia 22503
804.462.0979
nnlc@kaballero.com
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